Category: theatre

“When actresses were first allowed to perform publicly in England, they generally did not address the audience directly in a prologue or epilogue. As Sonia Massai notes in this anthology, when they did, their speeches stressed the ‘exceptional quality’ of the occasion.”

“Assured by producers that their jobs were safe, actors skipped auditions for other musicals. Band members signed apartment leases. Investors wrote more checks for the show.” And then it all imploded.

“Time will slow down during conversations and you will be able to hear them more accurately. This absolutely will happen to everyone who takes improv classes.”

For the most part, live theater — even that mass audience magnet, the Broadway musical — has managed to escape such labeling, with presenters convinced theater audiences tend to be sophisticated enough to do whatever “pre-screening” they might think necessary on their own, especially if they’re planning to “take the kids.”

“McNerney said the performances were not meant to be an insult or a challenge to lawmakers. They were meant to expose students to accomplished artists. ‘I hope they won’t punish us for presenting a piece of artistic work.’ And, he added, ‘not a cent of state money was used to support this’.”

Many of the encomia written for his 450th birthday “will likely omit or only fleetingly mention one fact: Shakespeare’s first acts of creation were not poems or plays, but the characters he gave life to as a struggling actor. This is no small omission.”

“William Shakespeare would be amazed at what we can learn about his world all these centuries later, just by walking around London for three or four hours and taking careful note.”

The darkly comic Arden of Faversham is (closely) based on an actual case: the 1551 murder of a wealthy provincial businessman by his wife and her lover.

“To deepen the sense of intimacy in the Palace Theatre, “Holler’s” creators decided to radically change its seating, spending $200,000 to reposition the ground-level orchestra seats into the kind of stadium seating common in movie theaters.”

“Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or lying.”